It seems like every summer a parent leaves their child in a smoldering car to die. Obviously none of these parents left their child strapped into the car seat on purpose, but it makes you wonder what is going through their minds. Now I am not a parent, and I do forget things pretty often, but one would think that if the little person that you gave life to is just inches away, you would remember that you have a responsibility to take them out of the car. Sadly, child hot car deaths are something that we’ve become accustomed to.

In 2014 so far there have been at least 18 heatstroke deaths as a result of children being left in vehicles. Just last Thursday Police in Wichita, Kansas found a 10-month-old girl unresponsive after she had been in her car seat for more than two hours after her foster parents forgot to take her inside the house. In 2013 there were 44 confirmed heatstroke deaths, and from 1998 until now there have been a total of 624, making an average of 38 child heatstroke deaths a year according to Golden Gate Weather.

Those are really sad statistics. RIP to every single one of them.

Alissa Chavez is a 17 year old from Albuquerque, New Mexico and she has designed a device called “Hot Seat” that alerts parents when it detects that a child has been left in its car seat. She is currently raising money to build a prototype. For the device to work, a parent will have to place a sensor pad on the child’s car seat. The pad will have a sensor that communicates with the key fob, which will sound three alarms (the fob, a phone app, and the vehicle alarm) if it senses that a child is still in the seat once the parent and key fob are a certain distance away from the car.

Brillant Idea, Alissa

While Alissa’s idea is a splendid one, I can’t help but think, why? Why is a device like this even needed? Have we become so distracted that we can’t even care for our children? Is technology the one to blame? Or are we too consumed by our own personal problems? Or are babies just too quiet nowadays?  It’s sad that a device like this is now needed in our society, we need to take a deep look within ourselves and ask what kind of people we really are. And it’s looking like we are just forgetful people. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said, “We encourage you to put something in the backseat to remind yourself that you have a child in the back, it could be a purse, it could be a phone, anything that will work for you.”

What could be a better reminder of your child being in the car than your actual child? Why are we more likely to check if we forgot our phone or our purse than our children? What does this say about us as a society? The piece of advice Foxx offered should have been to accept the responsibility of being a parent and remember to take your child out of the car; simple as that. As a society though we’ve come to accept that these things just happen, chalking it up to human error I guess. As Gene Weingarten explained it, any parent can fall victim to negligence.

“The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist.”

Interesting…

Well put Mr. Weingarten, but if the parents aren’t to blame, then who the hell is? Yes, the parents who forget their children made terrible, terrible mistakes, and they have to wake up and live with the guilt of having murdered their child every single day; and while that is punishment enough, I still think that they deserve all of the blame.

When you bring a life into this world, you take on a whole other world of responsibility. When you bring a life into this world you can’t afford to slip up or forget. When you bring a life into this world, you should be 100 percent about where your kid is from the day they leave the womb until their 18th birthday. When you bring a life into this world, it is your duty to be on your A-game every single day, week, and month of the year. There is no such thing as a break when you bring a life into this world. There are no “re-dos” or “oopsies.” This is not a phone or a laptop or a purse, this is a life, and when you bring a life into this world, it deserves a whole lot more than to be forgotten in the backseat of a car.

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Trevor Smith

Featured image courtesy of [Erik Bishoff]

Trevor Smith

Trevor Smith is a homegrown DMVer studying Journalism and Graphic Design at American University. Upon graduating he has hopes to work for the US State Department so that he can travel, learn, and make money at the same time. Contact Trevor at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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